Saturday, 22 January 2011

Second Life - Creativity within a shared virtual environment

Concept:

The work was part of the 'Changing Rooms' Project, hosted by EastSide Projects, Digbeth. Six resident artists each consecutively created a one week online installation designed to challenge the transitionary nature of Virtual shared environments. In this case the space was hosted by Second Life.

The creative space was occupied with 128 'primitive objects' that could be transformed in dimension and aesthetic to build a digital artwork.

I treated the project as a statement of my regard towards online collaborative practice and the creativity that could be achieved when working in a virtual environment.

My work exploited the loopholes of Second Life and the restraints of the project to create a virtual prison that once entered, could not be escaped. The first parallel was not an artistic one, it expressed concern toward the people who felt they would find salvation in life 2.0. In fact the only way to escape the maze, was to turn Second Life off.

To address issues of ownership, i scripted a non delete function into the primitive objects so that the maze could not be manipulated in anyway. In addition i moved the entire virtual space (a recreation of Eastside Gallery) several pixels upward so most of the static primitives could not be selected. Finally i placed triggered sound objects in such a way that you could not turn off the in-game sound once it had started.

My work was referenced in at The EVA conference in July 2010 as the author felt it was a bold representation of the dynamics of todays online collaboration practice in virtual spaces.